Stay (at) home

I’ve long given up the ghost of being able to go away on holiday this year. We’ve got a few family jaunts booked up, one as early as next month, and we know it just isn’t going to happen. Even the one in November is unlikely, the way things are going. We could be hearing Dominic Cummings’ ‘stay home’ message for many months to come, maybe even years. I’m so stir crazy now I just want a journalist to ask whichever politician is at the daily press conference to point out that actually it’s ‘stay at home’. Given that my grammar is so poor, I’m not going to labour the point.

Boris Johnson is under pressure from his rich pals to ease our semi-lockdown. Led by Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper and aided and abetted by the rest of the right wing press, which means nearly all of it, big business wants to send its workers back to work. Let’s face it: Johnson is so in thrall to the right wing media – he spent years learning how to lie whilst working in it – that he won’t say no, will he? There will be platitudes about ‘saving lives’ but, I’m afraid it will be more about saving profits.

But when our semi-lockdown is eased, what happens with our holidays? Well, surely they will be at the end of the line, along with pubs and gyms.

Let’s take Bristol airport – please. You check in at least two hours before your flight, sometimes less if you have only hand luggage and wear the same underpants every day. You shuffle through a crowded security area, you sit or walk around a ram-packed departure lounge and you wait at the crowded gate. Then, you sit on a tightly packed aircraft where you sit next to someone, unavoidably touching them for however long your flight is, breathing in recycled air. If a few people have Covid-19, the air conditioning system will happily spread it to everyone else on the flight, with the possibly exception of cabin crew who will be wearing PPEs from head to toe. When you get off the plane, think through what happens next in arrivals, on the bus to your resort, by the pool or on the beach, in the bars and restaurants. It will be horrendous. And there’s worse news than that.

Passengers may now need to check in five hours before their flights. That’s five hours before you depart and five more at the airport at the other end. That’s no joke. Would you believe, it’s worse than that.

It may be that countries could introduce strict quarantine measures whereupon you arrive anywhere abroad you must spent 14 days away from anyone else. In a worse case scenario, you might need to take three weeks off for a one week holiday and then another two weeks in quarantine when you get home. And that’s always assuming you haven’t fallen iLL with Covid-19 when you are away, in which case your problems have only just begun. Seven days in Tenerife might use up five weeks.

Ah well, older people won’t mind, will they? As Louis Armstrong might have pointed out, they have all the time in the world. Or do they? I’ve been to Spain a few times over the years and an enormous proportion of holidaymakers who go are old, some even older than me. Which puts many of them in the high risk group of dying from Covid-19. How many older people will take a chance on taking a week’s holiday in Tenerife, say, with the prospect of a five hour wait at the airport, a crowded plane breathing in everyone’s else’s air, carrying out extreme social distancing at the other end, another five hour wait to come home etc etc. Even baggage reclaim will be a nightmare, even worse than it is now. Especially at Bristol Airport.

Okay, then. We’ll go on a cruise with thousands of other people. Boarding might take a couple of days, but if the ship arranged a strict one way system and staggered hours for eating, it might just be feasible if you were to wear full PPEs for the duration of the trip, although I have an old fashioned view that perhaps PPEs would be better off with health professionals rather than people on the piss on a cruise ship. The holiday cruise is dead, literally in the water, for the unforeseeable future.

It could be that Dominic Cummings’ ‘stay home’ message may have even further reaching consequences that we never even imagined. We might be too terrified to go on holiday or anywhere else. Because we’ll be worried about that day, lying in a sun-drenched Greek beach when we develop a bad cough, a temperature and we lose all sense of taste and smell. We’ve got a day left and we suspect we are going down with Covid-19. Do we take a punt and hope we get through the airport temperature screening points and lie about how well we are, when we have a fair idea we aren’t well at all? And if we clear all those hurdles, do we risk infecting a couple of hundred fellow passengers, many of whom could be old and not in the best of health? Or do we own up and thank our lucky stars we booked proper insurance, if you can get it? Once the transitional period with the EU ends, we won’t be able to use local health provisions. We’ve taken back control of paying far more to get health care. Genius.

For next year, flights will be as cheap as chips, as will be the prices in holiday towns and resorts. It won’t last. Airlines will be desperate for income – any income – to keep going but by 2022 the era of cheap flights for a weekend in Majorca will be over.

I’ll be happy to stay (at) home for as long as it takes. I might be clinically depressed but I don’t want to die just yet and if that needs me to spend a couple of years at home, then so be it.